Just a quick lesson overview rather than a full plan etc today: this is an idea for helping learners with comparisons / comparatives.
Basically it starts out with the activity “Tea or Coffee”, follows up with the language input stage, invites comparisons between learners’ home country and the UK / USA etc and finishes off with an oppostion debate based around the initial “Tea or Coffee” activity. It’s materials light – in fact there aren’t any!
The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource.
But…. I’ve tended not to use it because of their policy of only giving users a limited set of “tries” on the online version before shutting you down. There is of course a way round that, which involves deleting all the cookies on your computer and clearing down your browser’s history and such like (check out this nifty and free download, if you want to know more about how to do that), but the hassle is a little too much to bother with….
However, the other day I went back and discovered the visual thesaurus has evolved into something more…
There is a growing collection of lesson plans related to use of the visual thesaurus, 53 and counting thus far, and while many seem more intended for native speaker language lessons, there are those that are aimed and EFL / ESL, and those that are adaptable to it (like the one on prefixes – word formation anyone?).
Other things on the site that I think are worth a mention include:
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State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook…..
There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, and what could be done to change the situation….
Who knows – we could start a social revolution right here?
But information transfer tasks are good ways of processing information and creating a meaningful context for language learning to occur in, so designing tasks around the huge pile of data that Save the Children provide would all give a good reasons for learners to develop their linguistic resource. Poster tasks, presentations (with or without powerpoint), charts and graphs all spring to mind. Of course for IELTS candidates, there are a lot of graphs and charts just waiting to be described in the data!
There’s also a documentary available on the website which could provide the basis for both listening tasks and discussion afterwards (though maybe not a good idea to watch if you’re expecting, or have just had, a recent addition to the family).
These are all just some initial ideas – if you have any plans, materials or ideas you’d like to share to develop this topic, please let me know!
This is a lesson aimed more at pre-intermediate / intermediate level learners that “introduces” SHOULD and SHOULDN’T. Though it can be used to revise the language point if learners have met it previously!
It is based around using Should / Shouldn’t for expressing advice within the “good idea” “bad idea” range – obviously this is not the only use of Should!
The lesson plan, which is relatively straightforward is available to download here: teflgeek – Should and Shouldn’t.
It’s ready to go as is – doesn’t need any additional planning or preparation.
The good idea / bad idea graphic above comes from a kids TV show – Animaniacs – which I remember from my earlier years ( I don’t know if it’s still going). Here is a Google video search selection for the segements, which could be used to extend or introduce the general topic with younger learners (or adults?).
Some additional online “should / shouldn’t” practice activities:
A flash gapfill task from englishgrammarsecrets.com
A sentence matching task from OUP’s Natural English Pre-Intermediate coursebook site
A type-the-answer gapfill task from esl-lounge.com
And finally – a downloadable Garfield based worksheet by Zailda Coirano posted on docstoc.com
UPDATED – from fifteen to twenty six! Many thanks to all those who contributed their ideas!
Does what it says on the tin! As part of a recent seminar – I have collected, invented, developed and stolen these fifteen alternatives to just giving the learners a gapfill task and then asking / telling them the answers. Some of them you’ll know, others you may have known and forgotten, and some may get you wondering why anyone would do that to a fellow human being… but hopefully all of them will be useful!
This post is also available as a pdf download by clicking here: teflgeek – twenty six different ways to do gapfills.
Acknowledgement: The activities given here were first presented during a seminar I gave at the International House Portugal Training Day on February 5th 2011, and subsequently as a seminar at International House Coimbra on March 22nd 2011.
1. Round the room Gapfill
Divide the text into paragraphs / sentences and post round the room. Learners write the gap numbers (e.g. 1 – 10) on a piece of paper and walk around the room, doing the task as an open cloze, writing down the words they think should go in the gap – either in English or their own language. Partial feedback – dictate the answers out of order and learners write them down next to their original answers. Learners go back to the round the room text and check their ideas. Full feedback.
2. TPR Gapfill
Give each learner a copy of the gapped text. Give each learner one of the target words. Learners then arrange themselves physically in the correct order. Partial Feedback – give number of incorrect answers. Full feedback – refer SS to full text (written record).
3. Banana Dictation
Learners write the gap numbers (e.g. 1 – 10) on a piece of paper. The teacher reads out the gapfill, saying the word “banana” instead of the gapped word. Learners write down a possible alternative. Partial feedback – Give learners the gapped text and allow them to compare their ideas in two groups and put their answers on the board. Full feedback – teacher gives number of correct answers and corrects wrong answers.
4. Shouting Banana Dictation
Divide the target text into two halves, ideally on a sentence by sentence basis to ensure that learners take turns during the rest of the activity. Divide the class into two groups. Group A gets one half and group B gets the other. Ask each group stand / sit on opposite sides of the room, so that each member of group A is facing a partner in group B. Learners take turns to read one sentence from their half of the text, saying Banana where there is a gap, and their partner has to guess what the word should be. Feedback.
5. Running Banana Dictation Gapfill
The teacher posts the gapped text outside the classroom (next to the DoS office is always a favourite). Learners pair up and run, read, relate and write, but – instead of relaying the “banana”, they have to say what they think should go in the gap. Feedback – Learners swap their written texts with each other and compare them with an original ungapped version, assigning marks for transcription accuracy and correct gapped words.
6. Mad Libs Style
Take a gapped text and work out which part of speech each gap represents (i.e. article, noun, etc). Dictate the parts of speech in sequence (i.e. Number 1 – noun. Number 2 auxiliary verb) and learners write down an example of that part of speech (i.e. 1 – elephant, 2 – has). You can give more guidance if you want, e.g. number 1 – an animal.
Then either give learners the gapped text to transfer their words into, or dictate the gapped text with learners adding in their words as they go. Learners can then compare their texts, enjoy the ensuing hilarity, and then try to “correct” the texts. This can be useful to focus on lexical chunks, and on grammatical structures.
7. Silent Mingle ( this one comes courtesy of Jamie Conway)
Give each learner a copy of the text and one (or two depending on class size) of the target words. Learners do a “silent mingle”, moving around the room, but NOT telling each other the answers, ONLY showing each other the word(s) they have. Learners then get all the words and put them in the right place. Feedback
8. Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
www.tes.co.uk has a version, as do http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/ppt-games/ and http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/index.htm, which has a blank template and various pre-made versions relating to the UK primary curriculum.
Effectively mimicking the style and format of the highly popular quiz show, learners are given different multiple choice options for each question, correct answers bringing them closer to the one million pound prize!
9. Wrong Words
Instead of giving learners a gapped text, give them a text in which the target words have been substituted for weird and wonderful alternatives. Learners then have to pick out the words they think are wrong, and change them for the words they think are right!
10. Banana Dictation Word Grab.
Put the target words if from an open cloze, or all of the possible words if adapting a multiple choice version, round the room / school / hidden in the DoS office. The teacher then reads out the gapped text as per a banana dictation. When learners think they know the correct word for the gap, they grab the word as quickly as they can. This can be done in teams or on an individual basis. The teacher continues repeating the dictation until all the words have been grabbed.
11. Grammar Gaps
Not exactly a Cloze task, but getting Clozer all the time! (sorry).
Remove the concrete from the brick wall, just leaving the bricks! – So in other words, re-create the gapped text as one that only contains “content” words, i.e. nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. leave all the “function” words out. Learners then recreate the text as best they can. As a way to provide more support, display a copy of the gapped text on the board. learners can come to you and check if they have a correct word, if they do, they can board it in the correct place. Thus by the end, they will have collaboratively arrived at a completed text.
12. Reverse Gapfill
This one needs a little bit of pre-preparation and would be easier to work with an Interactive Whiteboard / projector and subsequent powerpoint slides.
Basically, you start with a complete text, but then slowly remove words from the text (it can be random, but it works more effectively if you start removing words from the beginning, thus corresponding with the stage of copying that the learners are at). By the end of the first stage, you should have a blank, or nearly blank board. At which point, you can put the learners into two groups, divide the board in two and get each group to put the whole thing back again.
Full feedback – compare with the original.
13. Gaps? What gaps?
Take a gapped text and retype with without the gaps, but with still with words missing. Learners therefore first have to find the gaps, before deciding what to put in them.
14. DIY Gapfill – thanks to Simon Thomas (www.efl-resource.com) for this one:
This one, I think originally comes from Mario Rinvolucri’s “Humanising your coursebook” – essentially, you give the SS a variety of texts and they create their own gapfills, either blacking out the target words with felt tip (make sure it can’t be read on the reverse) or on the computers… This is a good way of raising awareness of what is typically gapped in exam tasks, but can also be used to focus on target vocabulary or language points (i.e. gap all the verbs).
15. Multiple Choice Wordle
Take the multiple choice options from your gapfill and wordle (www.wordle.net) them. Learners then have to work out which words form the four multiple choice options for each possible gap. Partial feedback – give learners the gapped text and a blank table to complete. Or give them the multiple choice options.
The above were my original fifteen ways – since giving the seminar I have more to add – thanks to all the participants (Jo, Jenny, Dave T, Kate, Jessica, Vera, Alexis, Dave C, Anna, Neil, Stella, Judy, Patricia, Marta, Michael, Daniel) for their contributions, which are listed here below, but I’m not sure who said what!
16. Memory Cloze
Do the text initially as a reading task, possibly with a gist task and then with a detailed reading task and then give it as a gapped text. This can be a nice noticing task, where learners’ attention is drawn to lexical chunks / collocations and the like.
17. Red Herrings
This can be run either as an activity in itself, or can be used as a partial feedback technique. Learners are given the answers with an additional set of “distractors”, and must choose the correct answers from the expanded set.
18. Flashcard / Picture Cloze
As learners are attempting to complete the gapped text, the teacher can display visual clues, either direct representations (i.e. a picture of an elephant if the gapped word is “elephant”) or a picture from which learners can infer the answer (i.e. a picture of people arguing if the gapped word is debate). These could be posted round the room, or just displayed one at a time as partial feedback.
19. Info-Gap
Here learners have two different versions of the text, where the gapped words in text A are different to the gapped words in text B. Learners are then paired and exchange the information to complete the gaps. This type of task can be adapted for use with many of the other ideas presented here.
20. Anagram cloze
Here the answers are given as a set of anagrams, which learners must unjumble before placing correctly. This could be used simply with the answer set, or with the answer set and distractors, or with a complete set of options from a multiple-choice cloze task.
21. Coded Cloze
Here, either the text or the answer set or both, are presented in a “code” form, with a decryption key for learners to work with. A simple way of creating these is to use one of the “Wingdings” font sets in Microsoft Word or Open Office documents.
22. De-lettered cloze
Remove either the vowels or, more challengingly, the consonants from the answer sets. Or possibly the original text, or both?
23. Miming Cloze
This would possibly work best with an info-gap type cloze task, where learners “mime” the answers to their partner’s gapped text.
24. One Letter at a time
Learners are put into teams and the teacher begins to read the answer(s) one letter at a time. The first team to correctly guess the gapped word gets a point. An alternative is to do this as a board race, so each team has to write their answer on the board with three points for a correct answer. Points could then be taken away for an incorrect guess / incorrect spelling.
25. Sticky Board Cloze
Similar to a word grab – the learners are in three teams and each team has a set of answer words stuck to the board (post it notes?). So for three teams, with a ten word cloze, there would be thirty words stuck to the board. Learners from each team take turns to come up, take a word from the board, return to their team and put the word in the correct place. At this stage, learners could need to present a correct answer before proceeding to the next word, or learners could try to complete the whole text with points then awarded for speed and accuracy!
26 “STOP!”
Create a “wrong words” version of the gapped text where you replace the target words with incorrect alternatives. Learners can be given the text for support, or not with more advanced classes. The teacher then reads out the text with learners shouting “STOP!” every time they identify an incorrect word. They can be given points for this and additional points for identifying the correct replacement. If not all incorrect words are identified, the teacher re-reads the text until either, all the answers are boarded, or there is silence and no-one can guess any remaining answers.
If any of the procedures above need further clarification or – more importantly – if anyone has a task to add to this list, please let me know!
This post is also available as a pdf download by clicking here: teflgeek – twenty six different ways to do gapfills.
This a re-post of a re-post….
Simon Thomas (http://www.efl-resource.com/on-english-grammar-lessons/) originally spotted this post
on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/03/13/english-grammar-lessons/).
A really nice range of flash based grammar games for every conceivable language point!
So thanks to Larry for finding it and thanks to Simon for pointing out that Larry found it!
… but you can’t make it put together a successful piece of writing. The whole hoof thing and lack of opposable thumbs gets in the way of text creation in general and successful writing in particular. Language learners on the other hand, can be helped with this.
Within the literature on the subject, there are three main approaches to writing: Product, Process and Genre and a useful overview of all three is given in Badger & White’s article in the ELT Journal (2000). Here the product approach is described more as written practice of a target language item or text type than developing the writing skill, though the control over what the learners write is gradually lessened as the learners demonstrate increasing mastery. Process approaches attempt to mimic stages of the natural process of writing: Hedge (2005) gives these stages as communicating, composing, crafting and improving. Process approaches invert the problem with product approaches, as the focus is on developing the writing skill rather than achieving mastery of a text type, though understanding of a given text type and its relationship to audience may form part of a pre-writing stage. Badger & White (2000) then describe genre approaches to writing, which they see as sharing aspects of the product approach, but differing in the view of language that is taken as genre approaches focus on the context and the audience for which writing is produced. Learners analyse a model for structure, form and language, before continuing in what is essentially a product approach. Their article then goes on to recommend, echoing their article title, what they term “A process-genre approach”.
Within this approach, which they see as a synthesis of product, process and genre, any piece of writing needs to be firmly grounded in the situation or context in which it is created, and will therefore be created for a specific purpose. This then has obvious implications for register (i.e. formality and informality), specific language required (i.e. language of persuasion, discussion, recommendation) and of course structure and organisation (i.e. text type features – letters, reports, essays etc). Once the writer has considered these ideas, they adopt features of a process approach – planning, drafting and editing – before arriving at a “final” text.
This is emphasised as a cyclical process, where work done at any stage of the text creation will inform the creation process and possibly lead to revision of the text or reconsideration of a previous stage. There are also opportunities for input at each stage, either from the teacher, the learners or other texts that may serve as a model.
This is all highly useful for teachers to consider and to work with as an overall strategy to develop learners’ writing skills, but is perhaps a little unwieldy for the learners themselves. It might be handy therefore, to provide learners with something simple to remember and to use as a guide when approaching a writing task, and on which they can build as their skills develop and their learning progresses.
With that in mind, the acronym CLOP might serve this purpose.
CLOP stands for: CONTENT, LANGUAGE, ORGANISATION, PURPOSE. Strictly speaking, it might be better as PCOL if we want to keep things in sequence, but that makes a poor and unmemorable acronym and we’d have to lose the horse metaphor completely.
In simple terms, Content asks learners to think about what they want to (or need to) write about. Language asks learners to think about any functions or lexis you might need to use. Organisation considers ideas such as paragraphing and overall text structure / layout. Purpose asks learners to consider why they are writing it in the first place – what do they hope their writing will achieve.
With lower level learners, this initially simplistic approach should help inform the creation of their texts in a way they can easily understand and work with. With higher level learners and with learners working towards language exams, the CLOP acronym can be used as a question analysis tool. Identifying the content points required in language exam tasks is often one of the areas learners fall down on, but once that is satisfactorily achieved, half the battle is over.
In their book, “How to teach for… Exams”, Burgess and Head (2005) suggest a process approach be adopted overall, which is possibly superseded by Badger & White’s process genre approach. Nevertheless, Burgess and Head do suggest a number of factors that learners need to take into account for exam writing. These can all be contained within the CLOP paradigm and have been included in the diagram as given below:
By familiarising learners with these ideas, in particular those of purpose and content, we can effectively help learners to raise their game sufficiently to create a successful text that achieves what is required of it.
From a classroom point of view, doing a CLOP analysis of target questions, for example those found in practice test books, should help learners understand what is required of their writing, identify relevant content and be able to present their writing in a structured and organised way, though additional work may need to be done on organisation, layout and language features relating to specific genres. If teachers ask their learners to do a CLOP analysis of a specific question, learners can then compare their ideas with the task specific mark schemes that are frequently given within the “answers” sections of test books, or at the end of past papers. This comparison, particularly where learners have mis-identified content points, may well help the learners along the path to a successful exam performance.
Further reading / references:
Badger, R. & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal, 54(2), 153-160.
Burgess, S. & Head, K. (2005). How to Teach for Exams. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Hedge, T. (2005). Writing (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A pdf version of this article is available by clicking here:
Simon Thomas’ EFL resource Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day Free Technology for Teachers
